


Strangely Are Our Souls Constructed

by thatsarockfact55



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, What Have I Done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 16:25:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8334385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsarockfact55/pseuds/thatsarockfact55
Summary: This is quite the game they’re playing.





	1. i longed to join them, but dared not

**Author's Note:**

> this is my birthday present to myself, which i started weeks ago, and then Memoria happened, and it all worked surprisingly well together, so i had to finish this fic. 
> 
> tw for: emotional abuse, gaslighting, tricky manipulation stuff. 
> 
> title and chapter titles are taken from Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.
> 
> the quotes from Memoria obviously belong to Wolf 359, and not to me. 
> 
> hope you enjoy! feel free to leave kudos, comments, etc!

1\. Dr. Alana Maxwell’s favorite book, besides _Nuts and Bolts: A Guide to Constructing Artificial Intelligence_ by Dr. Jasika Simmons, is _Frankenstein_ by Mary Shelley.

This should be surprising to no one. 

Kepler had laughed when she told him, smug, catlike grin widening across his broad face. “Figures,” he’d chortled, like he had known all along. 

Jacobi had immediately shrieked,  _“It’s alive!”_ before going back to building another one of his explosive devices, yelling more references to tease her with. 

It is important to note that neither of them know _why_ she loves Frankenstein. It’s not for the reasons they think.

She had first read the book when she was seven years old, eating lunch in the tiny school library as usual, and some other student had knocked it off its shelf. She began reading _Frankenstein_ immediately, and forgot about her apple juice and stale granola bar, and almost didn’t make it class on time. She loved books because they took her away from places, and this one was no exception.

Maxwell had never understood why Dorothy would ever want to go home. 

She kept borrowing the book from the library even though Millie Green and Kyle Waters and her older brother had wanted to read it too, because it gave her permission to think about science in a way that wasn’t just poking at ants or holding a magnifying glass at a certain angle. _Frankenstein’s_ science was life-or-death, making the impossible possible, creating something entirely new and grotesque and glorious. 

None of the teachers ever knew what to do with her, often smiling nervously whenever she requested more books to study, or whenever she asked about experiments that no one else had tried before. She couldn’t dissect Old Mr. Jameson’s dead cat, she couldn’t recite all of the names of the constellations by memory without being teased, and she couldn’t tell anyone about that time when she had almost set her great-uncle’s house on fire when she put a knife in the microwave to see if it would set off sparks, and how many, and what kind were they, what sort of fire resulted from this test, she didn’t know and she wanted, needed, to know–

She bought her own copy of _Frankenstein_ from the rickety bookstore with all of her two months’ worth of allowance, and she filled it with notes and diagrams and sticky-notes and questions that she couldn’t ask anyone else.

Kepler and Jacobi thought that Maxwell loved _Frankenstein_ because she sympathized with the protagonist, because she wanted to be like Viktor, and push past all boundaries in a quest for the ultimate scientific advancement. 

When she was seven years old, squinting at the words with her out-of-date prescription glasses, she liked the monster the best. He kept looking into people’s houses, wondering what all of it meant, and why they all seemed to like each other. He always asked the important questions, like _who am I_ and _where do I belong_ and _shouldn’t you love me?_

She cried when he died, like she had lost her very best friend, and it was an illogical thing to think, but that’s what it felt like. He wasn’t a monster, not really, not if she loved him so much. One of her sticky notes listed all of the names she’d liked to have given him, if he’d allowed it. 

Maxwell knows now that Viktor Frankenstein’s mistake wasn’t his ambition, or his need to prove himself, or even creating the monster in the first place. His mistake was that he never bothered to learn about the monster, or care for him, or take responsibility. Typical men: They lose interest, they leave, they think about science in a clinical, impersonal way, as though science in and of itself is not a living, growing, changing thing, as though it is theirs, as though it is safe. They pride themselves on their mediocre experiments and sounding intelligent without actually putting the work in, and they think that they’re the ones who have really, truly got it all figured out.

Her father was more like a scientist than he’d liked to think. He never answered her questions either. 

Maxwell is never going to be like any of them. 

She was fifteen when she entered her freshman year at MIT, tall and large and frizzy-haired, with enormous grandma-like glasses and acne on her chin and crooked teeth and a restless itch to know everything all at once. She was going to make people out of wires and binary and codes. She was going to care for them, and take responsibility, and love them, just like her father’s God promised He would. 

2\. Maxwell is very good at Midwestern friendliness. She’d mastered it when she was thirteen, and finally allowed to take the advanced high school courses with the older students. They stared at her too much, like she wasn’t supposed to be there. She beamed right back at them, because she was finally going to learn, and she was not going to let Bill Sampson or Madeline Everett or anyone else get in the way of that. 

She smiled her perfectly polite, warm grin she’d seen Mrs. Johnson and Ms. Smith and Mrs. Carlisle perform over and over again at the only diner in town, whenever someone had gotten lost on their way to a big city and needed directions, or whenever someone ordered something with particularly loud grunts, or smirks. 

People have always been afraid of her. They’re uncomfortable. Uneasy. 

At thirteen, Maxwell made sure to mention how much she liked to go hunting with her father. 

She hadn’t gone since she was eight, and had to say prayers over the body of the deer before she helped to butcher it–it tasted good, she threw up in the bathroom sink afterwards. After that, only Joseph and her father went on the trips. “Father-son character building,” the Reverend would joke, and Maxwell tried her best to not think about how the deer had looked, right before a bullet entered it. She still had to take care of the chickens when they went out on those trips, but after she could read without anyone interrupting her. 

At thirteen, she made sure to mention how she hadn’t bothered doing the homework because it was “too hard, my brother had to help.” 

She handed the work in after class. Joseph only did enough of his own homework to pass. 

At thirteen, she made sure to mention that she found Colby Rogers cute, like all the other girls did, and kissed Robbie Wilson for good measure when he handed her a Valentine’s Day card. He was still in middle school, in the grade she used to be in, but the high school and the middle school was all one school, so it wasn’t so weird when she saw him in the hallways. He had a constant stutter that people made fun of. They waved at each other in the hallways when no one else did. People thought that they were dating, after she kissed him, so she would duck her head and smile shyly and say, “I’ve always liked him,” in a voice just quavering enough to be considered pathetically romantic. 

They never dated, and she didn’t like any of the boys in town, but everyone was convinced that she was in love with Robbie, and that Robbie was in love with her, until she graduated. They didn’t need to make a big show of it; no one cared enough to look too closely, and that suited both of them just fine.

At thirteen, Maxwell had friends, and she told them that she went hunting, that her brother helped her with schoolwork, and that she had a crush on Robbie Wilson until they believed it. She let them paint her nails and convince her to wear dresses and talk about boys, and it was like a scientific study all by itself, _having_ friends without actually _being_ friends. 

This is the data she collected: 

Sally was the president of the seventh grade student council, blonde hair expertly styled, blue eyes sharp even when she smiled, cowgirl boots pristinely shined. She was going to win the county beauty pageant one day, no matter what it took, and use the prize money to get herself a pink pickup truck. She laughed and flipped her hair when boys passed by her. Not precisely ladylike, not perfectly kind, she smirked whenever one of them blushed. She applied cheap lipstick and eyeshadow and mascara like it was an art form, like it was armor, and didn’t look back when a boy was foolish enough to dump her. Sally was the only one who called her “Allie,” and Maxwell didn’t mind as much as she thought she would. 

Mandy always had marker scribblings on her arms, and wrote furiously in a little notebook she carried everywhere. Sometimes, her and Maxwell would sit at the library after school, before their parents or older brothers came to pick them up, and read together. Mandy tucked Dotlich poems under her arm, and memorized passages from a collection of Whitman poems they briefly went over in class, and was particularly protective of her secondhand copy of _The Bell Jar_. She wore long skirts and her grandmother’s necklace, and she was in charge of the yearbook and organizing the seventh grade dance. “Maxie,” she’d say in her breathy voice, “Maxie, what do you think about this?” And Maxwell would read Mandy’s poems about girls with wings, about a cow giving birth, about Montana mountains in the summer, and would make sure to tell her that her writing was brilliant even when it usually wasn’t. 

Jessica baked them muffins, and sewed their torn clothes, and made sure that they split the beer they’d stolen from Sally’s father equally amongst themselves. She had a cat named Spot who she loved very much, and always had cat hair on her old jeans. 

One day, at the diner, when the others were in the bathroom, Jessica told Maxwell, in the hissed whisper of a criminal, that she wanted to own her own house one day, and that she wanted to replace Mr. Henshaw when he retired as the high school physics teacher. 

“You like that science stuff, right?” she’d asked, eyes shifty and furtive. Her hair wasn’t as frizzy as Maxwell’s (no one’s was), but it did get in her face sometimes, when she didn’t bother to brush it out of the way.  

It’s funny; Jessica usually talked about how she loved it here, that she was going to stay in town and raise a big family and have lots of cats. Her best grades were in home ec and health. Now it seemed that she really wanted to know Maxwell’s opinion, which no one had ever really asked for before. Maxwell hadn’t even known that Jessica liked science, let alone physics. Excitement seized her: Did Jessica want to talk about particles, or atoms, or quantum mechanics, or gravity, or maybe even robots, or–?

Maxwell didn’t know what to say, because it seemed that when Jessica looked at her, shy and homely and plain and desperately hopeful, that she was _seeing_ her. 

Maxwell’s hand reached up, just for a second, to brush the hair out of Jessica’s face. 

Jessica froze. 

Maxwell placed her trembling hand back onto her lap. 

“Yes,” she mumbled, throat tight, eyes burning. “I mean, yeah, science is cool.”

Jessica smiled tightly, blurted out, “Thanks, I have to go to the bathroom, sorry!” and scooted out of the booth.

Maxwell looked at her shaking hand, and squeezed her eyes shut. Wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Sipped water from her straw. Tried to breathe right.  

Sally and Mandy and Jessica came back from the bathroom, and they were all busy talking about how Geraldine might be secretly pregnant and how Mr. Jacobson’s mustache was too long and that the history homework wasn’t too hard, just annoying, and–and Maxwell couldn’t stop thinking about wanting to fix Jessica’s hair. 

She marked some new passages in _Frankenstein_ that night. 

“You’d look so pretty,” Sally and Mandy and Jessica would say after makeovers, because apparently this was important for thirteen year old girls to be, “If only–”

None of them ever finished the sentence. 

Maxwell looked at herself in the mirror and saw the usual: Dark skin, frizzy hair, small brown eyes hidden behind thick-rimmed glasses, double chin, acne on her cheeks. She told herself that she looked just like Rebecca Cole, or Ann T. Nelms, or Octavia Butler. 

She almost cried when Mae C. Jemison was on a rerun of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sally and Mandy and Jessica were over at her house when it aired, and Sally had laughed in bemusement while Mandy had asked, “Do you need a tissue?” and Jessica had frowned and said, “Are you alright?” 

Maxwell nodded, didn’t cry, lump in her throat, and kept smiling and smiling and smiling. She taped as many Star Trek episodes as she could, and this was one of the ones she watched the most, along with episodes that had a lot of Uhura in them. She watched them late at night on their tiny TV, when her father and brother were asleep, and smiled real smiles, and laughed into her pillow, and dreamed about machines and space and warmth. 

Her father didn’t know that she watched Star Trek _._ He liked the History channel and the Weather channel and not much else. Joe thought that Star Trek was for nerds, and her friends watched it when they went over to her house after school, which was only once a month or so. 

Alison Wheatley watched Star Trek, and so did Jamie Jackson, and so did a couple other people, but they wouldn’t get it either, not in the way Maxwell did. 

She was so tired of keeping everything to herself. 

Sally and Jessica and Mandy all promised to keep in touch when Maxwell graduated high school two years later. 

She kept the couple of letters they sent her in her desk drawer, and didn’t write back. 


	2. a godlike science

3.  _“Alana, your brother and I hope you’re doing well. Let us know if you want to come home for Thanksgiving.”_

End message. 

_“Alana, it’s Dad. Just wanted to say that we had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Your friend–Jessica, I think?–she told me after church to say hello. We had fresh turkey, Mrs. Jones was kind enough to lend us some extra stuffing, Joe ate at least three helpings, my boy’s getting big and strong–anyway. We miss you. Hope you’re doing the Lord’s work over there. Have a blessed day.”_

End message. 

_“Alana–Alana, I’m–I’m sorry about Christmas, you know how your uncle gets, too much whiskey, and Joe didn’t mean it, you have to know–I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said those things either, of course you can come back, of course this is your home, Alana I love you–”_

End message. 

 _“Alana, I–you remember when you were little, and I told you that you were a gift from God? My little miracle. After Joe’s mother passed….I turned to the Bible so much in those days, bouncing Joey on my knee, praying for a blessing. Your birth parents may not have cared about you, but I did. I took you in. I loved–I love you. I don’t see color, Alana, you know that, you know I love you, right? No matter what? I don’t–I don’t care about the–the robots, or the science, or–or anything else, I don’t, I care about_ you _. You’re my little blessing. The Lord says to honor thy father and thy mother, Alana, listen to His wisdom–”_

End message. 

_“Uh…..hey, Alana. It’s Joe. Just wanted to say…Dad’s really upset. He’s not doing so good. Please call him or something, everyone’s worried about him. And….I’m, um. I’m sorry too.”_

End message. 

_“…It’s been two months. Two months. Is this what God wants? Is He punishing me? I’ve been a good father. I have. I’ve loved you, I’ve cherished you, what happened changes nothing. You hear? Nothing. Two months, Alana, and we haven’t heard from you. You’re my daughter, you have to–this is childish. I understand that what….what happened wasn’t the best, we weren’t at our best, but it was just a bad Christmas, that’s all. Call back. We love you. God loves you. Honor thy father, Alana.”_

End message. 

_“If you don’t see the way to the Lord, if you can’t accept His love, if I can’t help you see that we love you without condition–”_

Message deleted. 

_“What are you doing over there that’s so important? Got your fancy machines, that’s all you care about, isn’t it, not Philipsburg, not any of us–not any of us hicks, we’re beneath you, aren’t we–you don’t care, not even God could love you–”_

Message deleted.

_“Joseph failed his physics exam the other day. Said he couldn’t stop thinking about you. Think on that, Alana. Think about the pain you’re causing. Think about all the hurt you’ve made people feel–love thy neighbor–”_

Message deleted. 

_“People keep asking about you. You’re the lost sheep, Alana, you’ve strayed, but we’ll get you back. It’s that school, I know it is. We’ll take you out, you can come home, we’ll guide you back into the light, into His light–”_

Message deleted. 

_“…I’ve tried so hard to love you. We all have. We–I’ve made mistakes, but that’s–that’s in the past, it’s forgiven, God forgives us all for our sins. Even yours. Honor thy father.”_

Message deleted.

_“Fine. Fine, if you want to go down this path of–of creating false worshippers, of fashioning yourself into God’s imitation, of consorting with–fine. I can’t love you if you’re going to be like this, if you’re going to reject God in this way. Don’t come back.”_

Message deleted.

_“Alana, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it–please forgive me, honor thy father and forgive–”_

Message delete–

“Hey, you ok?”

Maxwell looked up. “What? Oh, it’s you. Jacobi, right? Daniel Jacobi.”

The boy–young man? he was older by a few years– grinned, Red solo cup in hand, eyes bright. “That’s me. And you are….Alana Maxwell? Robo-genius?”

Maxwell smiled slightly. “That’s me.”

“Nice to get away from the party, isn’t it?”

“…Yes.”

“Uh,” Jacobi squinted, trying his best not to look too closely at her. “What were you doing with your phone? Seemed….pretty busy with it. I play a mean game of Candy Crush if you want–”

“My dad’s an asshole. He sent me too many voicemails.”

“Would ya look at that. My dad’s an asshole too.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Maxwell glanced at Jacobi again–thin, big hazel eyes, brown skin, hearing aids in his stick-out ears, rainbow flag sticker stuck to one side of his cheek, Mexican flag sticker stuck to the other. 

“Hey,” she said, smiling Ms. Smith’s smile whenever she asked a customer if they were having a nice meal. “Are you staying here over the summer?”

“Yeah, I’ve got research projects planned, stuff with chemistry and making things go boom, the usual. You?”

“I’ve got work to do with the computer science program and the linguistics department–I’m interested in how we can get AIs to develop advanced vocabulary–anyway. I’m afraid I don’t have a place lined up yet–”

Jacobi grinned, shrugging his shoulders in a casual, almost sloppy way. “Say no more, _hermanita_. I’d be happy to have you.”

Maxwell blinked. “Well, that’s–thank you–”

“No problem. I get it, with the dad thing, and you’re, what, fourteen–?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen. As long as you don’t mind a messy apartment, I’m game.”

“I’ll clean sometimes.”

“Sounds like a deal.”

They shook on it. She’s taller than him, and he walked away stumbling and whistling badly. 

Maxwell leaned against the side of the house, bass from the party thumping through the walls, and deleted the rest of the voicemails without a second thought.

4\. She didn’t see much of Jacobi, and he didn’t see much of her. They were both too busy with research to do anything with each other besides heat up instant ramen and eat in tired silence and occasionally play video games or D&D together on the weekends. 

Still, they got along, and Maxwell learned that Jacobi loved noxious cheese and was irrationally afraid of ducks. He learned that she was as gay as he was, and that she loved watching Food Network competition shows. 

For the first time, she got to speak to AIs, and record how they responded based on what questions she asked, and how she asked them. 

They were simple questions, like, “What’s 2+2?” and, “Why is the Earth round?” but it was important research, and Maxwell couldn’t help smiling smugly to herself every now and again. Ok, all the time. She’d learned a long time ago that she had to take pride in herself, because no one else would.

“Word choice,” her professor told her while he reviewed her notes, “is crucial when it comes to artificial intelligence. Don’t ever say the wrong thing around them. Might mess up their programming, we’d have to reset some of their code–too much trouble. Don’t….offend them, I suppose, if they can be offended. Wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings, would we?”

He smiled genially at his own joke, and Maxwell plastered a placid twitch of the mouth on her face before getting back to work.

She crossed wires and fiddled with code and scribbled down equations and recorded questions and answers and in that lab, with only a few other students around, with Jacobi out of the apartment most of the time, with her phone on silent, she felt like the AIs were the ones she understood the best. 

5\. Maxwell went back home exactly once. 

She did not see her brother. She did not see her father. 

She visited Phil’s Diner and talked with Mrs. Carlisle and Ms. Smith and Mrs. Johnson, and they embraced her like she never left. 

“The usual?” Ms. Smith asked, eyes crinkling, dreads tied back in a long ponytail. 

“The usual,” Maxwell said, and ate her eggs and bacon on rye and chatted about chickens and cows and harvest seasons and the work at the mine and what everyone in town was up to, and she had almost forgotten how to speak this language, and she was surprised by how much she missed it. Her eyes stung. 

After the diner, she spotted Sally walking towards the movie theatre with a handsome man, and they chatted briefly ( “Mandy’s publishing a poetry collection right now last I heard, and Jessica–well, she moved away. Lovely seeing you again! Don’t be a stranger!”) before Maxwell spent the night at the bed and breakfast. Ted and Tina, the owners, raised their eyebrows and only asked a couple of pointed questions. Maxwell walked out of her room, tall and large and proud, and stood outside looking up at the Montana stars, and knew that she was never coming back.

The sky, though. The sky would stay with her always. 

5\. She filed the restraining order a week after she graduated at nineteen. She doesn’t remember much about that day, just that she signed a lot of paperwork and got spectacularly drunk and hooked up with Manuela the engineering student. 

She went to more school thanks to generous scholarships, and she played video games and D&D and watched Star Trek and debated about what defined afro-futurism and laughed at memes with the other grad students, and went out clubbing when she could afford it, and worked part time as a research assistant. She shaved her head, bought new tortoiseshell glasses, and smiled her Midwestern smile.  

Still. She felt most like herself when she was working with robots. 

She made them, she guided them, she loved them like her father’s God promised He would. 

6\. The people at the Nash Robotics Laboratory weren’t idiots, they were just small-minded. Too focused on risks of a far-fetched AI takeover, or on violating civil rights, and not on the important things, like actually making scientific breakthroughs, changing history, creating artificial consciousness–

“We’re just not ready for it yet,” her boss told her, sighing through his nose. 

“It wouldn’t be safe,” her coworker chimed in. 

“Developing AIs past this point brings up multiple ethical, legal, and moral dilemmas. We simply cannot continue beyond this point,” the head of the AI Board informed her, sounding vaguely irritated and very bored. 

Maxwell stood corrected. They were idiots, every last one of them.

Didn’t it make sense to develop them further, when the technology was able, when the resources were available, when the funding was being shelled out? What could possibly stand in their way?

The problem was that almost all of them had never really considered AIs to be people, not really. Just experiments, human imitators at best, a collection of wires and codes and automated responses. 

Maxwell knew better. 

She reread her duct-taped copy of _Frankenstein,_ and was on page 101 when Colonel Kepler called for the first time. 


	3. i am fearless and therefore powerful

7\. Goddard Futuristics does not have any idiots among their ranks. Not one.

This is both pleasing and terrifying. 

Maxwell is pushed to be better, to do better, and she pushes right back. The AIs are developing personalities, they’re growing, this is a huge scientific achievement, she gets more awards, she does not forget that she is working for a corporation that stalked her for six months, simply does her job, does what she loves, finally– 

She beams when she receives Unit 214′s file. 

8\.  Of course she brings _Frankenstein_ to space. 

“Mr. Jacobi,” she grins. 

“Dr. Maxwell,” he smiles right back, and they fist bump like it’s that summer all over again, and they both have exciting new things to discover.

“Gentlemen–and lady,” Kepler says, and they immediately straighten. “We have work to do.”

9\. Rescuing Douglas Eiffel is all well and good, following Kepler’s orders to distract and isolate is part of the job, but there’s reading Hera’s file and then there’s actually meeting her. 

It’s so easy to talk to her about her pathways and circuitry and codes and processes and speech patterns, and she could write fifty books on the way she insults crew members alone. 

She makes jokes, she works around her programming in such subtle and intricate ways, and she is determined to have a say in everything Maxwell does with her. (To her.) 

It’s breath-taking, and fascinating, and she could write reports that the AI Board of Directors would have to publish and award and fuck you, Board of Directors, she as right all along about AI development. 

Hera is also scarred, in pain, suffering, doesn’t mention it to the others, Eiffel didn’t know, and they’re friends, and he didn’t know, how could he claim to be her friend when he couldn’t tell, couldn’t see the signs–

Maxwell fixes her, she makes the pain go away, and doesn’t even need to try to get her to call Minkowski Lieutenant. 

She smiles to herself about an impressive start to a delicate operation. 

10\. Maxwell likes Jacobi, he’s one of her only friends, and she doesn’t mind Kepler, tunes him out when he tells them one of his stories, and yes, she would go down fighting with them if it came to that, but she really, really loves talking to Hera.

It’s a bit of a problem in terms of her mission objective, because she keeps getting distracted, but on the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to chat a bit while she repairs the busted-tin-can-death-trap that is the  _Hephaestus_ , right? 

“Ok, so if you could go anywhere in the universe, where would you go?”

“….The beach.”

Maxwell snorts. “Out of anywhere in the entire universe, and you choose the beach? Do you have a specific one in mind?”

“Not really. I just–I hear Eiffel talk about it sometimes, it sounds nice–”

Hera gets defensive very, very quickly. 

Maxwell sends the camera a reassuring smile. “Right, ok, you’ve made your choice. I’d like to go–”

“Maxwell?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, but did you just reroute one of the wires that deals with my sensory processing?”

Maxwell’s fingers twitch. Testing the waters. “Yes. I’m sorry Hera, I should’ve told you–”

“It’s fine. It feels better now.”

Hera does not say thank you.

Maxwell does not forget to ask for her permission again.

“It makes sense for the mission,” she tells Jacobi later, when they’re back on the _Urania_. “I have to get her to trust me if any of this is going to work out smoothly for all of us–”

“Right, right, you and the robot, as in a _machine_ , can get all hunky-dory, but Maxwell–don’t forget the mission. We aren’t here to fool around.”

“Says the guy who definitely did not put U Mad, Bro? posters all over his bunk.”

“Hey! I have fun making shit blow up, ok, but it’s not like my bombs can talk back.”

“Yes, I gathered that.” 

“Oh, shut up, you know what I mean. When I make something explode, it doesn’t protest, it can’t fight back. What I’m saying is, if the AI–”

“Hera.”

“If the AI needs to be detonated…don’t hesitate just because she can say a few sarcastic lines she learned from her crew, or whatever. She’s an asset, she’s a mission objective, and if those parameters change–you know the rules. Adapt.”

“Of course. I’m not an idiot, Jacobi. I’ll do what needs to be done, same as always.”

“Never said you were an idiot, Max.”

“G’night, _Danny_.”

“…You’re the worst.”

“I know I am.”

11\. Maxwell is stuck in sick bay for a while, what with almost getting blown up, and while Jacobi visits when he can and Kepler likes to make surprise visits, sending her paperwork to fill out, doing equations in her head only works for so long before she gets bored again.

“Hey, Hera? What’s your favorite color?”

It’s the kind of question she’s asked developing AIs before. They would have had to answer with a specific color from a previous test they’d taken in order to answer this one correctly. 

There’s a pause, and then the slight, familiar whir in the room increases ever so slightly.

“You didn’t give me any names for it.”

Maxwell pauses, thinks about how Hera’s programmers and developers and creators didn’t bother with a lot of things. 

Hera doesn’t trust her, not completely, which is good because it’s a sign of how intelligent she is. She’s got a good read on people, generally. She knows that Maxwell will feel the slightest twinge of guilt whenever Hera brings up another one of her limitations, something her creators failed at. It gives her some semblance of leverage. This is quite the game they’re playing, fast friends and tentative allies and uncertain enemies. 

Maxwell smiles softly. 

“Try describing it to me.”

Hera talks about the life cycle of stars, and how they almost gasp when they die, like they’re breathing, and that the colors are nothing like Earth’s, but it’s so beautiful, and Maxwell falls asleep without meaning to. 

For one brief moment, Maxwell loses control, and if Hera could, she’d smile back in triumph. 

12\. They talk about silly things: Maxwell tells Hera about memes, and Hera makes jokes about binary and programming and uses Eiffel’s pop culture references in increasingly ridiculous ways, and they team up for Funzo, but they talk about important things, too. Like their missions, and why they’re here, and also–

“If Commander Kepler told you to do something to me, would you do it?”

And also this. They talk about this too.

Maxwell does her best to be honest. One, because she has had enough of pretending to be somebody else, thank you very much, and two, because she needs Hera’s support if the _Hephaestus_ is ever going to get up and running like it’s supposed to be. 

“It depends,” she says in a cheerfully measured voice.

“On what?” Hera nearly snaps at her. It’s almost–if Maxwell had more time to think about it, it almost sounds like calculated anger. 

“On what kind of order it is, and how it’s asked, and how much time we have to implement it, and–”

“Ok, ok, yeah, but–but if you had to do something to me, and I–and if I didn’t want you to do it, but you had to–would you?”

There is no trace of hope in Hera’s voice. Just curiosity. 

Maxwell sighs. “I….I would do my job.”

Hera hums briefly, sending nearly-imperceptible shockwaves through the air. “Thought so,” she says, and that’s that. They talk about doing damage control on the ship’s radar system and Maxwell explains the modified code she’s installed into Hera line by line for the rest of the shift. 

Maxwell pretends that she doesn’t hear the note of sadness in Hera’s voice, and Hera pretends that she didn’t hear Maxwell hesitate. 

13. “Don’t get sentimental, Alana.”

There’s Earth bullshit, and then there’s space bullshit.

Maxwell is really, really sick of both kinds of bullshit. The universe’s bullshit. Everyone’s bullshit. 

She downs as much awful fake coffee she can manage and gets to work.

“We’re going to the beach,” she mutters, and refuses to let Kepler or Jacobi or anyone else stand in her way. 

14. “This is my life, and you don’t get to rewrite it to fit what you need. I don’t want to go. But if this is it? I’d rather go as me.” 

Maxwell is trying to breathe even breaths, but it’s hard when Hera says things like this, because Maxwell–

Maxwell thinks about the voicemails, and the restraining order, and how the monster couldn’t be terrible and ugly, not if she was like him, not if she loved him so much–

Hera insists and insists and insists– “you are the Lord my God, but you can’t fix people, you can’t fix _me”–_ and how many times did she want to say that to her father, to her friends, how many times had she thought that– 

Maxwell listens, after trying to interrupt, after trying to save her. She listens, and understands. 

“Are you done?”

Hera pauses. “What–?”

“Ok. Because that was idiotic.”

Fuck word choice, she needs to help her, and she has science to do, and a mission to complete, and Hera–

Hera’s problem is built into her personality matrix.

They _made_ her like this.

_You can’t do this. You’re not good enough._

Hera reboots, she’s alive she’s alive she’s _alive_ , and she’s going to be better, and the last three things Maxwell thinks before she passes out from–what, 36 hours of no sleep?–are, _I am going to murder Miranda Pryce_ , and, _Fuck I’m tired but it’s all done,_ and, _Hera is a person and I think I love her,_  so overall, it’s been an impressive set of realizations to have in the midst of this delicate operation. 


End file.
